we  harvested {when i say “we” it was really lorelai and ryan} our first strawberries yesterday. they are a few weeks later than usual due to our LONG winter.

we got a late start on the gardening season this year due to weather. we had record rain and wet until just a few weeks ago. it was a LONG winter here in the pacific northwest.

our resident veggie gardener, ryan, also had knee surgery in march. he was in a full leg brace until late april/early may which limited his mobility and ability to really get down in the dirt!

ryan got the dirt turned and put tomatoes, kale, edamame, garlic and onions in the ground.

the strawberries and blueberries come back every year, so they were already going strong…just a bit delayed due to our LONG winter.

we will be adding a few other plants in the coming weeks, but i wanted to share a quick tour that i posted to my instagram stories!

we go all organic with our gardening…like bat guano, dead fish, chicken poop organic. as i mentioned in the video, we also have a resident snake…she/he and their offspring have lived in our rock wall for years and really keep a lot of the pests away {slugs, etc}.

we hadn’t seen the snake yet this year and i was afraid that the winter had been unkind to it…did i mention our LONG winter?!

sometime after ryan and lorelai picked strawberries, the snake shed it’s skin in the garden. the full skin was just nestled up in the strawberries when we returned from a family walk/bike ride yesterday.

we found the snake snuggled up in the rocks after we found the skin. i’m not a snake person, but i am happy to have a snake eating the pests in my garden because i am not going to spray chemicals on the garden to keep pests away!

although we garden organically, we still need to wash yucky stuff off of our fruits and vegetables and we use thieves fruit and veggie spray for that purpose. just spray it on, let it sit, and rinse.

hoping to share more of our garden as it grows. since we were gone most of last summer i missed our garden and backyard posts, so i am excited to get back to them this summer!

you can also see more garden posts on instagram at #homeisinthegarden and #ourfrontyardsuburbanfarm

home is…in the garden 2017!